Toll Rises by Hour in Haiti Amid Ruin Left by Hurricane Matthew

LES CAYES, Haiti — A hospital now a shambles, its floors swamped with garbage and water, absent electricity. People living in the streets, camped in front of their broken homes. Buildings smashed into splinters. Farm fields flattened, portending a hard year ahead.

“For me, Roche-à-Bateau is not a place to live anymore,” said Warens Jeanty, 26, a tourism operator surveying the beach towns and picturesque port hamlets that dot Haiti’s coast. “People have nowhere to stay.”

As Haiti picks through the detritus left by Hurricane Matthew, more bodies are turning up every hour. Some estimates said that more than 800 people had died in the storm, more than double what the government has reported, though it acknowledged that the toll was unknown. In one part of the country’s southern peninsula, nearly 30,000 homes were destroyed and 150 lives lost, officials said.

And a full accounting of damage has not even started.

“I had never seen anything like this,” said Marie Yolene Gateau, a retired New York City guidance counselor who lives in Leogane, Haiti, a town that was largely flattened in the 2010 earthquake. Now the storm has wiped out most of the region’s sugar crop, bananas and mangoes, she said. “The hurricane was attacking the trees. I watched thinking, ‘When is it going to stop?’ ”

Passage to many areas remained blocked, thwarting efforts to assess the destruction and to help survivors. A single remote village reported 82 dead on Friday, while others said they were waiting to account for dozens of missing people. The government, which requires visual proof to count a death in its toll, could hardly keep up with the accounts of loss stitched together from hospitals.

“We’re still far from having a full picture of the extent of the damage,” said Marc Vincent, a Unicef representative in Haiti. “We are hoping for the best, but bracing for the worst.”

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Carrying a coffin on Thursday in Cavaillon. In one part of the country’s southern peninsula, where Cavaillon is situated, nearly 30,000 homes were destroyed and 150 lives lost, officials said.CreditAndres Martinez Casares/Reuters

Etienne Navuson, 27, waited out the hurricane this week in his concrete home as the wind lashed his village on the southwestern peninsula. When he awoke, almost everything had vanished: cattle, crops, fields and homes.

“Had the rain fallen more than it did — had it gone for just one more hour — we would have lost even more,” Mr. Navuson said.

At least 90 percent of the village was destroyed, he said. Residents are searching for food and water buried in the rubble.

“Those who find something are fortunate,” he said. Seven more family members have taken refuge in Mr. Navuson’s home after losing their own to the storm. The tiny home is now packed with people sleeping on plastic sheets for bedding.

“There will be food shortages in the days to come,” Mr. Navuson said.

Msgr. Pierre-André Pierre, the head of the Catholic University of Notre Dame of Haiti, encountered chaos when he reached the coastal town of Jérémie. Trees were gone, leaving an empty field. Someone had discarded a body in front of a Catholic bishop’s house, not knowing where else to dispose of it.

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Hurricane Matthew was the worst natural disaster to strike the Caribbean nation of Haiti since the earthquake of 2010.Published OnOct. 7, 2016CreditImage by Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters

“They were in a state of shock on what had happened in that place,” Monsignor Pierre said. “People were running in the streets.”

The monsignor said he then took a flight to the southern part of the peninsula where he passed over the town of Roche-à-Bateau, where little was left.

“That town did not exist,” he said.

Jeff Barnes, a Haitian-American pilot, was making relief flights on Friday. Many of the towns around Jérémie remained cut off from the rest of Haiti. In some neighborhoods, 80 to 90 percent of homes had been severely damaged or destroyed.

Swaths of trees had been reduced to stumps, he said. Large teams of young people had taken to the streets with machetes and chain saws, trying to clear roads blocked by fallen trees, some several feet in diameter.

“Almost everyone is living under the sky now, sleeping under the stars,” he said. “Doors are gone, people don’t have a place to live.”

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A street in the coastal town of Jérémie on Thursday.CreditLogan Abassi/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Observers said that the hurricane and the lack of a coordinated response recalled the troubles the country faced during the 2010 earthquake.

“It is during natural disasters such as this the frailty and near-absence of Haiti’s state becomes most visible,” said Michael Deibert, the author of two books on Haiti. “As the country slides downhill, the political elites squabble in the capital and the international community fails to come up with an effective way of engaging with Haiti’s most vulnerable.”

Others agreed.

“Haiti has been in the path of the storm just way too often,” said Robert E. Maguire, a professor of international affairs at George Washington University. “It isn’t because of anything the Haitian people are doing. It’s natural disasters exacerbated because of the way people have managed the country.”

Policies that ordered or permitted the stripping of trees have left barren and scorched landscapes susceptible to mudslides. Poor development has left the country defenseless to hurricanes, without sea walls or other hard defenses to soften the blow.

The nation’s politics, meanwhile, often brew their own type of disaster, leaving the country bereft of clearly elected leaders.

The interim government is still assessing the damage. Haiti’s Civil Protection Force maintained on Friday that fewer than 300 people had died, but Reuters had tallied that nearly 900 lives were lost.

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A boy removing mud and water from his house in Les Cayes on Thursday. “Almost everyone is living under the sky now,” one man said.CreditDieu Nalio Chery/Associated Press

In many areas, schools, police stations and other buildings that would typically serve as voting stations are in tatters. The hope of most is that the government will reschedule the elections for this year.

“We will have another disaster here if these elections aren’t held this year,” said Pierre Esperance, the executive director of the National Human Rights Defense Network. “The interim government doesn’t really have the power or legitimacy to control the country.”

For many, looking for food or still searching for loved ones, the elections were the last thing on their minds. On Friday, the Charmant Hotel in Jérémie had left a message on its website, saying its owners had not been in touch since the storm.

“We do know that Bette and Edwin were taking precautions for their guests, staff and family prior to the hurricane,” said the message, left by staff members.

Valery Numa, a well-known radio host in Port-au-Prince, ran three businesses — a hotel, a radio station and a Haitian Creole restaurant — in the town of Camp Perrin. All three were destroyed in the hurricane. But Mr. Numba has put an ambitious date, Nov. 1, for opening his three operations again.

“Any businessman who loses everything is going to be in distress,” he said, adding that he found himself lucky that none of his family members had died.

The aftermath of the storm also brought scenes of hope as survivors appeared. As the hurricane subsided, a team from St.-Boniface Hospital in southwestern Haiti went out to clear a route through debris. Looking up through the lessening rain, one of the workers saw the figure of a pregnant woman.

Her name was Julienne Cadet. She had been walking for at least half a mile. She was bleeding, in active labor.

The team quickly gathered around Ms. Cadet, helped her across a raging stream and drove her to the hospital. After an emergency cesarean section, she delivered two healthy boys: Jonas and Jean-atan.